In a post for Lit Hub, Karen Thompson Walker says that conceiving the inconceivable can help you unlock your imagination and create compelling characters and stories.
“When I was in college, my first creative writing teacher recommended a book that would change the trajectory of my life as a writer: The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by the neurologist, Oliver Sacks,” Walker writes. In his book, Sacks relates the stories of psychiatric patients who believed unbelievable things. “In the lives of these patients, what sounded impossible was revealed to be possible. The seemingly unreal was suddenly real,” Walker says. “Sacks’s portraits of these people shattered my own too-rigid sense of reality.”
Walker has used similar scenarios in her fiction, in part because she’s addicted to the feeling of unreality. “The experience of having my own sense of reality temporarily demolished, the way it was when I first encountered Sacks’s work, is a feeling I’ve come to crave,” she writes. “There is a pleasure in being reminded that we don’t yet know all there is to know about the universe—much less about one another. All three of my novels grew out of this idea.”
Writer Samanta Schweblin has said: “I never pay as much attention to what’s happening or to what I’m thinking as I do when something threatens my idea of what is possible, and, therefore, threatens my own reality… as a reader and a writer, I’m interested in narratives that go straight to the heart of that rupture.”
Walker also seeks out that rupture and encourages writers to stretch their concept of what’s possible.
